Lucerne Station Hall

Luzern

IN SHORT

Stier and reworked by Hans Auer, was destroyed by fire in 1971. The competition for the new complex, organized by Swiss Federal Railways, was won by Amman and Bauman in 1975. In 1983, the Swiss Federal Railways commissioned Calatrava to produce a design for the entrance hall and portico of the new station. His light-weight glazed structure, which responds to the lakeside site on the fringe of the old town, is conceived as a distinctive and totally independent volume extending the length of the station facade.

Calatrava proposed a transparent glass construction with a roof that cantilevers from 16 prefabricated concrete columns, each 14-meter high, that line the 109 meters facade. These compression columns are braced by a row of interconnected steel tension-spindles and support an aerodynamically inspired cornice, its proportions suggested by the neighboring neo-classical buildings. From the plane of this interconnection, steel beams project diagonally backward toward the facade of the main building. Each of these three-dimensional trusses, splayed at each end in plan and stiffened in section by a triangular node, is suspended at mid-span from the heavy cornice, using a tie that pierces the glazed structure to form a cantilever.

The trusses rise up to the overhang of the station building. But the two structures do not meet; a gap remains for the circulation of air. Similarly, the simple glass panels of the inclined facade do not reach the horizontal interconnection between the support columns but leave a ventilation gap. The well-proportioned portico is strongly linked to the city and does not exceed the height of the adjacent buildings. It creates a rhythmic frontal statement between the station building and the lake shore.